730 Days or Two Years in Ten Minutes
by Shaz.Bananas
Summary: A one-shot, a partner-piece to go with the fan fiction 'Psychiatrists', showing the life of Amy Pond in the two years between Prisoner Zero and the Atraxi and the Doctor reappearing on the night before her wedding in The Eleventh Hour.


Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, the BBC or anything else to do with it.

This is a one-shot, set in the same universe as my 'Psychiatrists' fanfiction - you don't have to have read the other to understand this one, but it might help a bit. This is set during the Eleventh Hour, in the two years Amy spends waiting for the Doctor between Prisoner Zero and him turning up on her doorstep the night before her wedding.

Now, I'm not saying I understand Amy - sadly, I never had a time travelling imaginary friend. But I have felt something a bit similar. I was just realising I had feelings for someone when they disappeared from my life, with not much reason really. He was gone. All of what I wrote here about missing someone is based on my own experiences - so they are realistic, hopefully. Enjoy x

**730 Days (or: Two Years in Ten Minutes)**

Two years are a very long time. 730 days to be exact, give or take a few.

It is 703 days for me; 703 without the Doctor, waiting, longing. But that's okay. Because I'm Amy Pond - all I've ever done is wait for him.

At first I am convinced he will come back in a few days. He's just miscalculated, he'll come back soon, chattering away about all of his mad ideas, talking about aliens and planets and star systems and the future. He'll be back. He wouldn't leave me again, not when I waited so long.

After two weeks, my conviction begins to ebb away.

After three months, I realise he isn't coming back. I shout at Rory and we have a blazing argument in the kitchen - what about, I can't remember. Something trivial and foolish, something that didn't matter. But I was brimming with anger and desperation and shock, I had to let it out somehow. It's hard to have an argument with someone who hasn't even bothered to stay around for it.

I lie awake at night, straining my ears for the sound of those whooshing, whirring engines. I try to remember every word he ever said to me, every conversation we ever had, everything we did together - which isn't much. I try to piece it together at night, every little scrap of him I can savour, locked away in a box inside my head that I can open when I'm lonely or when missing him becomes unbearable. I daydream as I go to the shops, to the hospital to meet Rory for lunch, to work; I daydream that I see him, standing at a lamp post on a street corner, sitting on a bench at the bus stop. Every daydream ends with him dashing over to me, grabbing my hand and telling me to come with him and never look back. But then I remember. He wouldn't be at a lamp post on a street corner, or on a bench at the bus stop - he's more likely to be on another world, than here. Why would he come back for me, when it was so easy for him to leave in the first place?

There are times I give up on him, times I am convinced I hate him, that I wouldn't say a word to him if he showed up on the doorstep that very second. But every time I think of how I hate him, deep down I know that if he appeared right now and asked me to go with him I would be gone like a shot. I think about him every day - and that even goes for the days when I loathe him, and wish he'd never even bothered to enter my life that night when I was seven years old. It always ends the same - me, sat alone in my room staring at the crumpled drawings and battered cardboard models I had made as a child, missing him, wanting him to come back, wondering if I'd done anything wrong: always silently pledging that I would wait as long as it took, for him to come to his senses and come back to me. Deep down I knew that I would wait a lifetime for him, and that didn't scare me at the time, but it does now. You see, now I'm beginning to understand what that feeling meant; because I never would have promised to wait for him if I hadn't felt so strongly for him. It told me a lot of truths, that feeling.

And then Rory was down on one knee, ironically right next to the shed where the Doctor had crash landed his blue box, all those years ago. And I'm saying 'yes' and he's sliding the ring onto my finger, grinning like he's the happiest man in the universe, and why oh why does this feel so wrong? Why is there a sickening feeling rising in my stomach? Why is it that the first thought that jumps into my head is not that I'm going to be married, but that now I'll never be able to go with the Doctor. That today, in that very second, I had done something I never believed myself capable of doing. I had given up on him.

I don't sleep very well that night and when I finally do fall asleep, at a dim hour of the early morning when my alarm clock is blinking 3:18am in garish red, I am plagued with dreams. I'm running through the woods and something is chasing me, or perhaps I am chasing something - yes that's it, I'm chasing him. I can almost see him ahead of me in the trees but he keeps moving so fast that I lose sight of him and I am filled with the dread that I must catch up with him, I must reach him before he escapes me again-

Then it is summer and I am lying beneath the oak tree on the thin woollen plaid blanket, staring up at the branches dappled with sunlight. I am 15-years-old and my head is full of darkness and it is here and now that I lose my virginity to Rory, but I look up and it is not Rory's face above mine but _his,_ smiling at me so gently, his hair falling into his eyes.

And then I wake up and my heart is pounding, and Rory is asking me if I'm alright. I feign a quick smile and murmur something about a nightmare, and dash off to the bathroom before he can get a good look at my face - it's as if the Doctor is on my skin, it's as if Rory will know I've been dreaming all of these things if he just takes one look at my flushed cheeks and my mouth quirked into a irrepressible smile.

I splash my face with cool water and stare at myself hard in the mirror. This has to stop. This has to end right now, because he isn't coming back. I have Rory now, and I'm getting married - _it's not enough, he'll never be enough compared to him_ - and everything will be alright in the end. It has to be. It just has to be.

"I've never loved anyone as much as I love you, Amy." Rory had said that day in the garden, the day he proposed to me, so hopeful down on one knee. "You make me so happy."

And how could I say no to him? I love Rory - I do, it's just not enough somehow. I always thought loving someone would be enough, but I know now it isn't. You can't love someone properly if your still waiting for someone else. It just won't work.

Aunt Sharon squeals when she first sees the ring and then grabs me in a crushing hug that is too tight. She hugs Rory next, and they are both so smiley, so happy, so overjoyed and cheerful that it suddenly occurs to me that I am not. I am not looking forward to my own wedding. It feels more like a countdown - a time limit. Time I have left before I have to let go of the Doctor forever. I can kid myself that I let him go long ago, but I know deep down that I am lying, it's all I seem to do. Smiling when relatives ask me about the wedding and say: "Not long now!" in hopeful, excited voices which only brings a paralysing spasm of dread to my stomach. Telling Rory that I can't wait to be his wife, that I can't wait to start our life together. I can't marry him, and yet I will because I am Amy Pond and he is Rory Williams, and Amy Pond and Rory Williams are supposed to get married and be together forever. Amy Pond is not supposed to run away in a magical blue box with a man called the Doctor and live happily ever after - fairytales aren't real, after all.

I try so hard not to feel like this. I try to get excited when we book the church for the wedding, when we set the date - _tick tock tick tock - _when I go shopping for wedding dresses with Aunt Sharon and she starts crying and all I can do is laugh. And then I'm crying because it suddenly occurs to me that my parents will never get to see me get married. My Dad won't walk me down the aisle. My Mum won't be sat in the pews, as proud as punch, but dabbing her eyes with a tissue because her little girl is leaving her.

But the wedding doesn't seem real somehow, it's like we're pretending. Even when we're choosing the bridesmaids, even when Jeff, the best man, is rehearsing his speech and cackling loudly at every rude joke he's managed to fit in, even when Aunt Sharon decides she wants to give me away. It's play acting, a game, like the raggedy Doctor and when I'd make Rory dress up in those old clothes and we'd dash about together holding hands.

When I get an anonymous card wishing me congratulations on my engagement I am convinced it is from him. I analyse the writing, scan every word, searching for proof even though I have no idea what his handwriting looks like. Then it turns out it that it is from Auntie Jenna, Dad's sister, and her little girl Eleanor; Eleanor, being six years old, had forgotten to sign a name at the bottom. We laugh about it like it doesn't matter, but at every laugh my heart breaks a little.

I have nothing to remember him by, no tokens, no trinkets from our time together. I have no photographs of us together - it was one day, and yet it was a lifetime too. I only have the drawings - those _cartoons_ - I had drawn as a little child, all wobbly lines and heavy felt tips, never quite colouring inside the lines. He never even saw them, there's hardly a trace of him in them. There is nothing I can cling to, nothing that smells like him, nothing that we bought together. It is like a break up, but we were never together.

My hen night is three days before the wedding itself. It consists of myself, Aunt Sharon, Auntie Jenny, my twin cousins Julia and Samantha, and a group of girls from work. They all get roaring drunk. Julia trips and nearly twists her ankle in those ridiculous high shoes. Samantha leaves her handbag in a bar and spends half the night trying to find it. Aunt Sharon and Auntie Jenny get teary about their husbands - useless sods they turned out to be, and take photographs out of their wallets saying that even though they hate them most of the time, they can't seem to stop loving them either. They say that I have a good one in Rory - "he's a good lad is Rory, he won't let you down. Don't you let him go!".

Rachel from work flirts outrageously with one of the security guards and disappears early. Shy Tina sits quietly at the bar, sipping her drink, blushing like crazy when we suggest she gets up and dances with the rest of us. I drink to block everything out. Voices boom and holler around me, out of focus, distorted, far away, forgotten.

"Bloody hell, he's right gorgeous!"

"You could never get with him, Sash. Anyway, I thought you were back with Mark."

"Yeah well, that's finished-"

"I hated Billy in the end… but oh, how I loved him."

"Men break your heart Sharon; but for some reason we can't stop loving them."

"Aww Amy, you're so lucky getting married to Rory."

"Yeah, he's dead sweet and he's got a good job, well good money…"

I gulp down any drink given to me, until my eyes are watering and I can't stand up properly because everything just keeps going sideways. The next thing I know I am being lumbered into the back of a taxi, next to Aunt Sharon who is fast asleep. Julia and Samantha are talking about how fit the barman was in the last club we went to. I sit there silent, my head lolling against the window, staring at the blurs and pinpricks of light as the world whizzes past, thinking for a moment that they could almost be stars.

The night before my wedding, and he's standing in my garden.

"Come with me." he says. Come with me, as simple as that, like he never left me, like he's never been away, like these hellish two years never even existed. But it's so hard to be angry with him when he's looking at me like that.

"Where?" I blurt out, angry and tearful and so, so happy he is here all at once. So happy that he didn't forget about me, he never did. I knew he didn't, I knew it.

"Wherever you like." He smiles rakishly

And at that moment it oh so quietly trickles into my heart and I've fallen in love with him in about three seconds (or was it fourteen years?). I don't realise it then, but I will someday. One day I'll look up at him and I'll know what that feeling banging away in my ribcage is all about. One day.

But not today.


End file.
